Wendyl Nissen: Gobbling down the bacteria

Unpasteurised cheeses' bacteria fire up the gut's weight loss efficiency.

For my 50th birthday a few years ago I gave myself the gift of weight loss. By the time I shared a celebratory glass or five of bubbles with my girlfriends I had dropped two dress sizes and apparently looked "fabulous". So fabulous that I inspired three of my girlfriends to also lose weight because, frankly, if I could do it, anyone could.

Then I put it all back on, for the simple reason that losing weight is really, really hard. To do it I went to the gym religiously and a personal trainer made my body ache every day for the three months it took to drop the kilos. To get up off a chair I had to crawl out of it like a woman twice my age and I had to roll in and out of bed like a seal.

I also ate very little. One week I ate only 1000 calories a day. What happened that week involved a permanent bad mood, low tolerance of anything and anyone and lots of crying. I fired three people including my bank manager which, in retrospect, wasn't a great thing to do.

Losing weight was a nightmare I wanted never to repeat, and I happily joined the 65 per cent of people who return to their pre-diet weight within three years. I am now the size 16 my body likes to be. I am tall and of Danish descent so I tell myself my ancestors were big, strong women who herded cows in Jutland's picturesque mountains and I shouldn't fight those genes. When my friends discuss diets I often quote Erma Bombeck who said: "Think of all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart."

Recently, however, I've found out why it's so hard to shed kilos. It's because my gut bacteria is all wrong. According to The Diet Myth: the real science behind what we eat, by Tim Spector (he's a doctor), it is a scientific fact that one person will gain weight eating the same food as another who will not.

Spector has spent a lifetime studying twins and found that when he put pairs of twins on a food plan intended to cause weight gain, some gained large amounts while others gained very little. Genetics played a part, too, because each set of twins had the same amount of weight gain.

He has also examined bacteria, which make up 90 per cent of the cells in our bodies and their most important jobs include manufacturing vitamins for us and breaking down and digesting our food. The trillions of bacteria in our gut weigh nearly 2kg and research has discovered that small changes in this finely balanced community can affect our immune systems, metabolism, body weight, mood and may even cause diseases.

So, if you have the right stuff in there, you digest and metabolise food in a positive, weight-losing way.

Although I'm not actively trying to lose weight, I am cultivating my "microbial garden" by feeding myself lots of good bacteria. I bored the cheese counter guy witless getting him to find all the unpasteurised cheeses in his cabinet.

I'm making my own bacteria-filled yoghurt, sauerkraut and kombucha. And I'm hoovering down garlic and onion and loads of fibre, which is the friend of gut bacteria.

I'm also working on eating a greater variety of foods, aiming for 30 different types a week. We used to eat 150 varieties of food, now we eat fewer than 20 and if you eat junk food you eat only four: wheat, soy, corn and meat.

I'm cuddling my cats and dogs a lot to grab some of their bacteria and not wearing my gloves when I garden so that I can host lovely soil bacteria. I'm resisting the urge to shower often so that I'm no longer scrubbing away all the healthy bacteria on my skin.

I'm not yet ready for a stool implant - where they take someone's really good bacterial stools (I'd opt for a supermodel's) and stick them in you to gift you great bacteria. But, in 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised to see this as a new way to help people lose weight free on the public health with lean, healthy people dropping in to donate poo.

My family continue to eat as they normally would and are doing their best to ignore their strange-smelling wife and mother. "This too will pass," quipped my husband to my daughter when he thought I couldn't hear him.

I have a challenge for supermarkets. Each year 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted worldwide. In France soon it will be illegal for supermarkets to dump food or, worse, pour bleach on it so it is inedible by scavenging poor people. By July next year supermarkets must have signed up to a charity that will give the food to people in need or feed it to animals.

Supermarkets, wouldn't that be a nice thing to do with your food waste which, let's face it, is still quite good when you throw it out?

The cost of setting up the system would be a small chunk out of your immense marketing budget, and the good PR would be a great payback.